Computers Get 3D View Of World

Carnegie Mellon researchers Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert, along with graduate student Derek Hoiem, have succeeded in teaching computers how to spot the visual cues that let thinking beings distinguish between vertical surfaces and horizontal surfaces in photographs of outdoor scenes. The computer to can automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image.

This remarkable advance should help computers serve us better in our three-dimensional world, a place that machine vision has been persistently unable to understand. Hoiem showed the computer 300 images from Google; statistical associations were made between shapes, shadings and other aspects of each view.

According to the Carnegie Mellon press release, computer science researchers concluded that this task was impossible, or computationally impractical, by 1980.